[geeks] Zombie Disk Sleep

[David Cantrell]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2001 at 04:36:29PM -0400, Big Endian wrote:
> Nono... a process was reading from tape, there was a race condition 
> or something in that both the tape drive and the program were waiting 
> for the other to respond.  The program was in "Uninteruptible Disk 
> Sleep"  (blocked while waiting for the tape to spit something back). 
> You can't even kill -9 that program, its there, and the tape drive is 
> locked until reboot.  Its an evil problem, one I've yet to see fixed. 
> I've not run into it for a LONG time and I'm wondering if anybody 
> ever found a way to kill that process.

FWIW, I have the same problem with my CD burner.  It burns the first disk
just fine, but if I try to burn another, it locks up.  The rest of the
machine is just fine though, so I could do a proper shutdown.  Now, I
do a controlled shutdown and power-cycle the box before burning each disk.
I suspect SCSI borkenness, but can't be bothered to investigate.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

      We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity
      has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
                                                -- Richard Dawkins